Media Gallery

In Lorrie Moore’s short story “Agnes of Iowa,” Agnes, a white teacher, stays after class one evening with Christa, her only black student, to talk about Christa’s creative work. Agnes finds Christa “smart and funny,” Moore writes, and enjoys chatting with her about her writing.

Tonight, Agnes had decided to talk Christa out of writing about vampires all the time.

“Why don’t you write about that thing you told me about that time?” Agnes suggested.

Christa looked at her skeptically. “What thing?”

“The time in your childhood, during the Chicago riots, walking with your mother through the police barricades.”

“Man, I lived that. Why should I want to write about it?”

Agnes sighed. Maybe Christa had a point. “It’s just that I’m no help to you with this vampire stuff,” Agnes said. “It’s formulaic, genre fiction.”

“You would be of more help to me with my childhood?”

“Well, with more serious stories, yes.”

Christa stood up, perturbed. She grabbed back her vampire story. “You with all your Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston. I’m just not interested in that anymore. I’ve done that already. I read those books years ago.”

“Christa, please don’t be annoyed.” ….

“You’ve got this agenda for me.”

“Really, I don’t at all,” said Agnes. “It’s just that—you know what it is? It’s that I’m just sick of these vampires. They’re so roaming and repeating.”

“If you were black, what you’re saying might have a different spin. But the fact is, you’re not,” Christa said, and picked up her coat and strode out—though ten seconds later, she gamely stuck her head back in and said, “See you next week.”

Professional writers are, perhaps, no better off than Christa; audiences and critics sometimes play the role of Agnes, preferring that we remain native informants, despite our other interests. And we, too, are sometimes forced to stick our heads back through the doorway and say, “See you next week.” There’s a power dynamic at work here.

But as Christa suggests with her “Why should I want to write about it?” and as Agnes quietly admits, writers write for different reasons—and some are not interested in writing about versions of themselves. A certain kind of writer revisits and reinvents the old; another chooses to explore what is entirely new. Many writers will, in their careers, do both. But who finds it easiest to open the door to the latter category? In a recent piece for PolicyMic, “The One Thing White Writers Get Away With, But Authors of Color Don’t,” Gracie Jin argues that “[i]n a society masquerading as post-racial, it is still only the white man who can speak authoritatively for every man. People of color, on the other hand, are expected to speak only for themselves.”

She’s talking about what’s happening to Chinese-American, Queens-raised author Bill Cheng in the wake of the release of Southern Cross the Dog, his debut novel, which takes place in the Mississippi Delta during and after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. She compares the scrutiny Cheng has faced in writing what he doesn’t know to the leeway given Adam Johnson, who researched North Korea to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son. Not so shockingly, Johnson, who as Jin notes is “plain old American,” comes out way ahead.

But as Jin observes, Johnson’s rather further along in his career than Cheng. Not convinced that Cheng’s being treated unfairly? Take a look at another example: how The New York Times portrayed Cheng and Stegner Fellowship wünderkind Anthony Marra, the author of the extraordinarily well received debut novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Marra’s novel is set in 2004, during the second Chechen War, and flashes back to the first war, in 1994. The Times ran an article about Marra in May, the same month it ran a piece featuring Cheng. When the pieces came out, Cheng had never been to Mississippi, and Marra had been to Chechnya only once, just prior to going over the final draft of his book.

I read the articles having not read the novels, though I plan to pick up both. And I read with particular interest; I write fiction using a boatload of research, and I’m curious about how readers, journalists, and critics perceive and credit that approach when it’s obvious that a story is coming from something other than experience. The two stories provide an unusual case study, because the writers have certain similarities: not only do Marra and Cheng have nearly analogous relationships to their subject matter, but both are American men in their late 20s who graduated from top writing programs. And their books came out around the same time. But the Times treats them strikingly differently: Marra receives accolades for writing through research, while Cheng has to earn his way past suspicion.

I chose the appellations above (Marra’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford; Cheng as a Chinese-American from Queens) from the credentials the Times elects to cite first. The initial mention of Marra’s Stegner affiliation comes as an aside late in Charles McGrath’s story. But before that, Marra is quoted directly and at some length about his experiences researching his book: “Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of… It can be one of the real joys of writing. Someone once said, ‘Don’t write what you know, write what you want to know.’” Eventually, we hear about his family and his years growing up in Washington, D.C., but the meat of the story is not his background—it’s his brain and his opinions about writing. When he’s given room to sound off on research and its joys, the Times is sending us a subtle signal that he’s an expert worth hearing. We even get a short history of how his writing developed, and a glimpse of an unpublished novel. When he’s so deeply fleshed out, and speaks for himself, I don’t have to leap a big imaginative chasm to think of him caring about something other than his own life. I have a real sense of what he observes, and what interests him.

Julie Bosman’s piece featuring Cheng, by comparison, marks his ethnicity and childhood home right off the bat, in the second paragraph, and co-signs onto a tone of skepticism about the whole enterprise of his novel: “It’s no wonder the Southern literati have raised an eyebrow at its author: Bill Cheng, a 29-year-old Chinese-American from Queens who has never set foot in Mississippi.” While McGrath’s article about Marra lets him speak first, and talk about his research in relation to his work, the piece about Cheng quotes a bookseller first. The story isn’t about what kind of writer Cheng is, or how he thinks about craft—it’s about what others think of Cheng’s work, and how he reacts to that.

“I was highly suspicious of this book when I first started it,” said Richard Howorth, the owner of Square Books in Oxford, Miss., and a revered authority on Southern literature. “I was won over.”

The article quotes three booksellers, in fact; Howarth was “suspicious,” the second was “questioning,” and the third “said that she believed that Mr. Cheng had ‘transcended’ his own background to write the book.”

Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Photo by Smeeta Mahanti.

While Cheng’s background is an obstacle, something he has to “transcend,” and his writing subject to a series of interrogations, Marra’s background is nearly irrelevant, his achievement inarguable. Marra is cast as a young master while Cheng steels himself for scrutiny and suspicion. Marra, a white American male, is barely a foreigner in Chechnya, and we hear nothing about whether Chechens have read his book, or what they think of it; Chinese-American Cheng is a foreigner in another part of his own country, and we hear more from other readers and booksellers than we do from him. If the booksellers are speaking in coded language about Cheng’s “otherness,” that goes unremarked. Marra’s work is “acclaimed” from sentence one, while Cheng’s novel’s superlative reviews aren’t mentioned until later. Talented Marra has worked and grown to become the writer he is today; talented Cheng, it would seem, has simply and exotically manifested. It’s supposed to be hard to imagine him writing about the South.

In fact, with what we have in this article, it’s hard to imagine him at all. As Jin asks, who has permission to research, to be an outsider, to be authentically inauthentic? The Cheng profile quotes a bookseller speculating about how Cheng managed the feat of writing Southern Cross. “He must have done a ton of research or has read a lot of Faulkner,” she says. Why are we guessing? The only phrase that hints at his method: “he drew from his deep knowledge of the bluesto write the novel.” His research remains mysterious, nearly unknowable, as Cheng’s voice is drowned in a flood of opining others. When Cheng is quoted, he’s put on the defensive, and notes his status as an outsider: “I don’t have the advantage of being from there, from that region, of that race… It’s tough. But my responsibility is to tell stories, to tell the story I want to tell in the way I want to tell it. And if there are repercussions from that, I’ll just have to face it.”

Indeed. And some of the repercussions may be in the subtly racialized coverage that has one piece quoting a variety of people asking how he did it—and the other article actually getting to the answer. I wondered if I was the only one seeing this Grand Canyon separating the two stories, but when I Tweeted the two links together in June, other writers raised electronic eyebrows. One person I discussed this with offered various explanations, counterarguments and speculations: Mississippi is in the U.S., and, after all, far easier to get to than Chechnya; publishing marketing material may have landed heavily on Cheng’s ethnicity. The first argument made more sense to me than the second. Should journalists leap onto marketing bandwagons so swiftly? Why is Bill Cheng, a minority, so “suspicious” when he is interested in something not ostensibly himself? How very strange, an American writer choosing to locate himself in regional American literature and history that interests him! It’s as if no one has ever picked up The Red Badge of Courage.

In Cheng’s case, connecting author biography to fictional material throws into sharp relief the question of where an Asian-American voice belongs in a region that’s long been defined in terms of black and white—and the tiresomely pertinent question of who is American. Is the concern that Bill Cheng had never been to Mississippi when he wrote his book, or that people cannot easily imagine an Asian-American living in, writing about, or caring about the South? Must that burden be Bill Cheng’s—or should it, perhaps, belong to Agnes?

V.V. Ganeshananthan is a fiction writer and journalist whose debut novel, Love Marriage, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2008. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Washington Post, Ploughshares, Columbia Journalism Review, The Atlantic, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Sepia Mutiny, among others. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Phillips Exeter, she is currently the Delbanco Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. She is a former member of the boards of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and the South Asian Journalists Association.

Events

How does history – particularly the history of war, colonialism, and marginalization – impact the work of Asian American poets across time and space? How does language act as a haunting space of intervention and activism? Poet and scholar Jane Wong raised these questions with her digital multimedia project, The Poetics of Haunting. For the last workshop event of 2017, Wong and poets Carlina Duan, ChristineShan Shan Hou, and Muriel Leung read work and share images that boldly invoke historical and familial ghosts so that we may feel their presence.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Carlina Duan’s debut collection of poetry I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017) wrestles with the growing pains of Chinese American girlhood and racial consciousness. Franny Choi writes, “In I Wore My Blackest Hair, [Duan’s] speaker navigates diaspora and its incumbent losses — of family, of language, of face — with unflinching care, revealing complex textures and concrete magic.” Carlina is a 2016 Fulbright grant recipient and an MFA Candidate at Vanderbilt University. Her work has been published in Uncommon Core, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. Check out her poems about her father, silence, and the echo of “Who Let the Dogs Out” on a schoolbus in The Margins.
A garden, an intimate and intense look at being a lonely girl, and a shape-shifting feminist spiritual quest of imagined histories, Christine Shan Shan Hou’s Community Garden for Lonely Girls (Gramma Press, 2017) creates strange and mutable new generational mythologies. The Poetry Project writes, “Community Garden for Lonely Girls invites readers of all gender persuasions to momentarily suspend the Enlightenment imperative to cultivate their individual plots and embrace the feeling of being disposable — and disposed into — a mass flowerpot.” Work from Community Garden for Lonely Girls appears in Jane Wong’s Poetics of Haunting Digital Project: “We talk over each other all the time. We exchange ghosts in the details.” Christine is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her previous publications include “I'm Sunlight” (The Song Cave 2016), C O N C R E T E S O U N D (2011) a collaborative artists’ book with artist Audra Wolowiec, and Accumulations (Publication Studio 2010).
Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti (Noemi Press, 2016) is an arresting account of loss and the unresolved nature of mourning and making art. Publisher’s Weekly calls it, “an elegant, elegiac debut collection set in a haunted and highly ritualized space.” Cathy Park Hong writes, “Leung’s poems can be unbearably intimate yet also epic, traversing into the speculative and gothic, as she animates her grief into a macabre and exquisitely haunted underworld…”; Hyperallergic writes “She meets the violence of her grief with poems populated by holograms, robots, and ghosts.” A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a contributing editor to the Bettering American Poetry anthology and is also Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Southern California. She is from Queens, NY.
Jane Wong is a poet, scholar and the creator of the Poetics of Haunting digital project. Inspired by her scholarly manuscript on the of ghosts in contemporary Asian American poetry, Going Toward the Ghost, the project grew into a TED Talk, a digital collection of haunting poems, a record of with conversations with Bhanu Kapil and Sally Wen Mao, and a piece written in conversation with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s archive. Of her powerful debut poetry collection, Overpour (Action Books, 2016) Full Stop writes, “There isn’t [a page] without arresting imagery and a suggestion of forceful, generative life.” A former Kundiman and Fulbright Fellow, Wong is an Assistant Professor at Western Washington University. Check out her poem from Overpour, “Pastoral Power” and her conversation with Sally Wen Mao about the book in The Margins.
NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.
This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.
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A special discussion about music and the ghosts of America’s racial past featuring two highly acclaimed authors. A murder mystery, a ghost story, and two cultural tourists collide in Hari Kunzru’s spellbinding novel White Tears (Knopf, 2017), which connects contemporary cultural appropriation and white hawkers of black music with the history of racism and the forgotten geniuses of American music and Delta Mississippi Blues. Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Margo Jefferson’s classic work of cultural criticism, On Michael Jackson (Pantheon, 2005), a complex and tender portrait of the King of Pop, reckons with child stardom and the specter of racial ghosts that shaped his celebrity. She’ll read from her evolving work on Michael Jackson and current writing on jazz singers. Moderated by Kevin Nguyen, editor at GQ.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Seth and Carter, two young music-obsessed culture vultures, find themselves thrust into a murder mystery involving the ghost of a blues musician that takes Seth to Mississippi, unraveling the depth of the history of racism and exploitation in music. The New York Times writes, “White Tears is distinguished by a knowledge of blues at its deepest, a gift for observation at its most penetrating and stretches of plain old marvelous writing.” Slate raves, “Call it a ghost story or a rumination on art, possession and responsibility—or both—it has all the force of a truth that can be neither denied nor buried—at least not for long.” Hari Kunzru is the author of four previous novels: The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, and Gods Without Men. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin. Check out his piece written in response to F.N. Souza’s painting “Degenerates” in The Margins.
The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica. Her memoir, Negroland, received the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She is also the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Kevin Nguyen is an editor at GQ Magazine, where he writes about books, music and popular media. White Tears is his favorite book he read in 2017 “by a mile,” calling it a “tremendous, smart, weird book.” Kevin was formerly a book reviewer for Grantland, and has published in The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and The Millions.
This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.
NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.
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